A quick weekend thought as I’m at a wedding this weekend and working on a few other things. The thought? Why is Twitter so damn bad? Look, I get it takes time to turn a tech company around. Twitter had a lot of technical debt, and you don’t just solve that over night.
Jan 8, 2022·edited Jan 8, 2022Liked by Andrew Walker
On the desktop, Twitter still doesn't make me whitelist the site so my ad blocker gets rid of all the ads. I mean, even my local paper makes me whitelist their internet site. It seems like no one at Twitter is even working on the desktop version.
Also, the main reason I will never own the stock is that Twitter bought Vine eight years ago. Vine was basically the pre-cursor to TikTok. And Twitter shut it down because they couldn't figure it out. Not only did they incinerate their investment, TikTok is probably now worth 2x more than Twitter. What a missed opportunity, lack of vision and complete inability to execute. Truly, a "clown car that fell into a goldmine".
The engineers I know who have worked at Twitter generally have poor things to say about the company's "business culture" (i.e. product vision, execution on user-facing features, etc.) after walking away.
I would contrast this with, say, Amazon, or even Facebook, where people who left generally didn't *enjoy* working there over time, but they still felt like those companies got things done.
I would also say that private equity firms have a uniquely terrible reputation within tech — much worse than in most industries — and I would anticipate Elliott and Silver Lake's involvement to have a chilling effect on hiring even if they can get the stock to start working again. (To be fair, a non-working stock also has a chilling effect on hiring when half your total comp is in RSUs.)
I remember a mentor telling me early in my career: "the second you find out one of your vendors has been acquired by a private equity firm, you need 3 alternatives evaluated by the end of the next week and a migration plan in progress."
Whether or not that's a fair evaluation is an open question; whether or not that's the general feeling in the industry is something I can tell you is a fact. Keep in mind that a lot of BigTechCo Product Managers are hired out of HBS, GSB, Wharton, Sloan, etc and the best ones who don't have negative feelings about PE are probably just going to go work for a PE shop.
Perhaps they count be a trillion dollar company - but banning people like Dr Malone at a time when a Supreme Court Justice things 100,000 kids are in the hospital with omicron and compares sparks out of a machine to humans spewing virus as the defense of masks…. I’m going to take the under as users flock to substack (like this one), GETTR (which is analog twitter right now, obviously) and broadly people tune out minute to minute updates on “deep thoughts with Jack Handy”
The platform is ridiculous, without even the most basic features , like alerting when a particular poster TWEETS, with a unique alert, or audio. Would be even more useless without Tweeten or better tweetdeck enhancements.
Also finding the engagement count to be pitifully low even when including multiple high volume stock symbols in the tweet.
So interesting the Twitter's product is so loved by its customers (using generic language) but TWTR is lower than it was when it started trading 8 years ago while the QQQs are up over 400% over the same period.
On the desktop, Twitter still doesn't make me whitelist the site so my ad blocker gets rid of all the ads. I mean, even my local paper makes me whitelist their internet site. It seems like no one at Twitter is even working on the desktop version.
Also, the main reason I will never own the stock is that Twitter bought Vine eight years ago. Vine was basically the pre-cursor to TikTok. And Twitter shut it down because they couldn't figure it out. Not only did they incinerate their investment, TikTok is probably now worth 2x more than Twitter. What a missed opportunity, lack of vision and complete inability to execute. Truly, a "clown car that fell into a goldmine".
Sorta anecdote-y, but:
The engineers I know who have worked at Twitter generally have poor things to say about the company's "business culture" (i.e. product vision, execution on user-facing features, etc.) after walking away.
I would contrast this with, say, Amazon, or even Facebook, where people who left generally didn't *enjoy* working there over time, but they still felt like those companies got things done.
I would also say that private equity firms have a uniquely terrible reputation within tech — much worse than in most industries — and I would anticipate Elliott and Silver Lake's involvement to have a chilling effect on hiring even if they can get the stock to start working again. (To be fair, a non-working stock also has a chilling effect on hiring when half your total comp is in RSUs.)
I remember a mentor telling me early in my career: "the second you find out one of your vendors has been acquired by a private equity firm, you need 3 alternatives evaluated by the end of the next week and a migration plan in progress."
Whether or not that's a fair evaluation is an open question; whether or not that's the general feeling in the industry is something I can tell you is a fact. Keep in mind that a lot of BigTechCo Product Managers are hired out of HBS, GSB, Wharton, Sloan, etc and the best ones who don't have negative feelings about PE are probably just going to go work for a PE shop.
Perhaps they count be a trillion dollar company - but banning people like Dr Malone at a time when a Supreme Court Justice things 100,000 kids are in the hospital with omicron and compares sparks out of a machine to humans spewing virus as the defense of masks…. I’m going to take the under as users flock to substack (like this one), GETTR (which is analog twitter right now, obviously) and broadly people tune out minute to minute updates on “deep thoughts with Jack Handy”
The platform is ridiculous, without even the most basic features , like alerting when a particular poster TWEETS, with a unique alert, or audio. Would be even more useless without Tweeten or better tweetdeck enhancements.
Also finding the engagement count to be pitifully low even when including multiple high volume stock symbols in the tweet.
Yahoo! has always been kind of similar. A lot of users, but very poor execution to unlock value
So interesting the Twitter's product is so loved by its customers (using generic language) but TWTR is lower than it was when it started trading 8 years ago while the QQQs are up over 400% over the same period.
Twitter has banned far too many ppl
It’s evident in drop of its price of high of 85 to 39 now